Monday, April 02, 2007

Beatings

Chicago's top cop resigned today. We'd had two big news stories involving off-duty police getting in fights in bars, followed by allegations that members of the force had engaged in attempted cover-up.

I just started paying attention to beating number 2. This one starts with a group of off-duty cops at a bar. One of them is crying, reportedly because of the recent death of his father. A businessman allegedly tells the crying cop, "Stop crying, you pussy."

Now, if you want to start a brawl in this town, that's an excellent opener. There are many people here who would take that as license to clobber. As they used to say in Westerns, "Them's fighting words." Our laws, and our police regulations, do not actually approve of this sort of thing, but our laws have also failed to stomp it out.

So when a man is cryingOver his father's dying,And you feel the strangest urgeTo impugn the fellow's courage,Say something kind, instead,So he doesn't bash your head.